In the early years, a child’s brain is growing and developing important new connections. Starting a chat with “I wonder…” introduces ideas about the mind like thinking, knowing and questioning.
This kind of mental-state language helps us understand the minds of others, and enriches the speech your child hears, with extra layers of meaning.
You can use wonder with children of any age!
When your little one is learning about the sounds of their languages, your voice provides a great opportunity for learning. Talking about things that you can’t see or don’t know expands the number of things you can talk about!
Little ones are building up a collection of words they understand. Because “wonder” sentences are longer than regular sentences, they can enrich the speech your child hears by providing more speech.
With their growing word knowledge, little ones can start learning about mental state words like “wonder” “think” “know’ and “feel”. These words can help them understand more about the minds of others.
As children’s language skills continue to grow, Wonder is a great way to enrich the speech your child hears with more complicated sentence types, and extra layers of meaning. Wonder sentences contain two different ideas in one, so they are more complicated than regular sentences.
Goals. Wonder provides your little one with three opportunities to learn. First, wonder sentences show little ones how to talk about things that we can’t see or don’t know. This is called decontextualized language, and is a key feature of what human languages allow us to do. Second, wonder sentences are more complicated than regular sentences, so they are a great way to enrich the speech you baby hears. Third, wonder sentences provide examples of how to use words about the minds and moods of others. You can use a variety of mental-state words including ‘wonder’, ‘think’, ‘know’, ‘feel,’ and ‘seem’.
How does it work. When we use mental-state language like “I wonder where the birds are going”, we have two layers of meaning in one sentence: In the top layer, you are talking about our own mind – what you do and don’t know about the world, and what you are curious to find out. In the second layer, you are talking about something outside ourselves – in this case, the birds – where will they go? Mental state words like “I wonder…” help us to nest one idea inside another (an embedded clause), making our sentences rich and complex. Providing examples like this helps our little ones to learn about more complicated sentence types. Some scientists also believe that learning words like ‘wonder,’ ‘think,’ ‘know,’ ‘feel,’ and ‘seem’ helps children develop skills for theory of mind at an early age. Theory of mind is a set of skills that help us understand the minds of others, and predict how they might behave.
Key Point. When you use wonder you can use any mental state words that add layers of meaning. This includes words like think, know and feel. Children have the best chance to learn these ideas when they hear this kind of language used to talk about a variety of different people including themselves, you, and others. For example “What do you think will happen next? I think the monkey will eat a banana, but Daddy thinks he will eat peanuts instead!”
Multilingual insights. All languages have ways of talking about things that we don’t know, guessing about the mental states of others, or expressing our curiosity about future events. You can use the wonder activity in any language!
Further reading
Read the science:
Ebert, S. (2020). Early language competencies and advanced measures of mental state understanding are differently related to listening and reading comprehension in early adolescence. Frontiers in Psychology, 11. FREE ACCESS LINK: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7311764/